The Joys of an Actor AU
You know the feeling of being devastated about the sad, messed up, tragic happenings of a story? Normally this could be resolved by telling yourself that none of this is real anyway or imagining a fix-it fic, but Then you would need to confront the nonexistence of the characters you've grown to love, and all the attempts to overwrite your memories with a happier ending never actually measure up to the canon story anyway,... so is there a way to solve this dilemma?
I present u... the Actor AU!!!
When you Imagine it was played by actors that ressemble your beloved characters, the tragedy gets recontextualized as something that was acted out. No need to change the plot, just put another layer of context above it. So sometimes, heartcrushing scenes can be seen as hilarious when played out by the actors. Also the characters are very alive and well as actors!!! Another part of the fun is to see the personality contrast between the character roles and the actors themselves, since you know... this all was just an act. Just an excuse to have them act out of character, lol-
Btw, I've yet got to see an actor AU coming from some lighthearted source material, depicting a production nightmare with a lot of drama. That would be interesting to see...
My framework of Actor AU is mostly formed by fandom stuff. Here my favorite examples:
But y'know, this could also work with your OCs! I have thought up an Actor AU for my ocs a long while ago. In fact so long ago, that it probably wouldn't work out on practice anymore since I've redesigned them a lot. … I've thought up actors that share similarites to several of my ocs, so it would be interesting to see what range of roles they would play. Now after the redesigns, with some characters, there are barely similarities at all. Especially with Junko; her face doesn't look human anymore, So the Actor AU isn't as effective as it used to be. Well I guess U can still see it as elaborate costuming or VA work.
